SAP HANA Vora – All our data, accessed through one place in real-time

Just over a month ago SAP announced the release of SAP HANA Vora, their answer to the “Big Data” versus “Enterprise Data” question. But what is it and is it really worth considering in a world full of big data game-changers like SAP HANA and Hadoop?

So the answer, in my opinion, is yes – Vora is absolutely worth considering. So let’s start with what SAP HANA Vora is, then I’ll cover how you could use it and finally how to get started.

What is SAP HANA Vora

At it’s most basic Level, Vora is an in-memory query engine for Apache Spark designed to facilitate enriched and interactive analytics on Hadoop. That’s enterprise-grade analytics on top of your Hadoop data. Vora also facilitates the combining of your Hadoop content with your enterprise data coming out of SAP HANA. This allows result-sets that are built of more than just your hot data in HANA but any other data distributed throughout your Hadoop data lakes.

The name, SAP HANA Vora is a bit misleading though because you don’t need HANA to use Vora. You can simply deploy Vora on your existing Spark instances on Hadoop and you will have a whole new world of enterprise-grade analytics available to your data scientists.

All our data, accessed through one place in real-time.

How can you use Vora

Hopefully if I have done a good job in my “what is SAP HANA Vora” section this should already be obvious. We are now looking at a world where data that we store in our Hadoop data lakes can be combined with our real-time enterprise data. This can be sales data analysed along side years of historical data, IoT (internet of things), behavioural analysis to prevent fraud and all backed by data that could open up a whole new world of insight. The list is endless and spans so many industries and use-cases.

But even more than that, suddenly our vast stores of data can be put to work in ways that were not possible before this. I’m not saying that what Vora brings was impossible before, far from it. What it does do is allow us to access and gain insight from our data on a day to day basis by bringing our Hadoop and enterprise data closer together.

All our data, accessed through one place in real-time.

How to get started

SAP HANA Vora is in ramp-up as of September 25, 2015 so you will need to apply for access to the ramp-up software. If you have a Hadoop setup already in place with Apache Spark then you are in a good place to start trying out SAP HANA Vora as long as that installation meets the prerequisites stated in the installation manual which can be found on the SAP HANA Vora help site here.

If you have any questions as you begin your Vora journey please do feel free to reach out to me and I’ll be happy to help.